ABSTRACT

In demographic terms, Africa is the youngest continent on earth: children aged under 15 constitute 41 per cent of its population (PRB, 2015). However, until the late 1990s, there were relatively few academic studies of children or childhood in Africa. A few anthropologists and others had explored children’s lives (examples include Katz, 1991; Katz and Monk, 1993; Schildkrout, 2002), but children were considered decidedly marginal to academic interest. In the 1990s, this began to change, driven in part by two distinct processes. First, people-centred approaches to development provided a rationale for attending to the lived experiences of Africa’s populations, and in particular the lives of those deemed marginalised. Studies of women, minority ethnic groups, peasants and the urban poor were soon supplemented with studies of children. Second, the 1990s witnessed a surge of interest in childhood among social scientists. The so-called ‘new social studies of childhood’ (James et al., 1998) focused in particular on children’s social agency and on the social construction of childhood. African children and childhoods offered particularly enticing examples of both.